


Hallowed Ground

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: All Hallows' Eve, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Death Rituals, F/M, Genderswap, Mirror Universe, References to Torture, Roman Holidays, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:48:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are certain traditions to be observed around the fires on All Hallows. Kirk owes it to McCoy to keep her from becoming part of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hallowed Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my Halloween meme, for [](http://rubynye.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://rubynye.livejournal.com/)**rubynye** ’s request. This is somewhat indulgent PWP, but I enjoyed writing it, and I enjoyed the unimportant scene-setting research that went into developing it into what it is—and then it morphed into something a little bit more sinister of its own volition.

*

There hasn’t been a cross raised at a public All Hallows festival in over seven centuries, not since the Bloody Reformation in 1517 led to the ascension and fall of a new imperial church when Emperor Fidelis I was assassinated in 1521. Terrans still wear white robes to the festival, though the same chants are used for different gods, older gods that belonged to Rome, before the blighted period of the Old Church. It is one of few holidays on the Terran calendar that Kirk remembers with fond memories: the end of season bounty brought in by slaves of the Empire; the warm, spicy scent of the Orion girl his mother gave him as a gift the year he turned sixteen; the golden harvest moon rising off the horizon and glowing over tall bonfires and shadowed, masked figures in white every year since he was eight and permitted to come to the festivals with Sam’s hand firm on his shoulder. They were never in danger of attack. Even if their mother’s reputation and the legacy of their father weren’t enough to protect them, which was too often the case and Kirk has scars and the blood of his first kill to prove it, some things are sacred.

Starfleet Academy puts on a hell of a party for All Hallows, if only because it’s one of the few times that cadets can cut free, blowing out all the tension building up like a tangible weight in the air. Saturnalia, or at least the modern equivalent of it, is another such holiday, but while that’s all mayhem and ritual chaos, it’s also commonly the cover for a number of high-profile assassinations. This is different, civilized tradition and primal release all at once. Kirk recalls the hot flush on his face when his mother first told him that Sam was conceived on All Hallows, one night shortly after the full conquest of Orion, but now his blood sparks at the idea of heated, slick skin and warm breezes and tall bonfires full of Orion palms and the roar of the ocean. In San Francisco, though, the air has the faintest chill as the mist rolls in from the Bay and toward the fires burning tall and hot in the center of the quad, pushing back the shadows of night so that they condense on the edges of the circles of light while white-robed cadets cross between the blackest shadows and the brightest light.

One of the dancers step out of the shadows and into the stark firelight and Kirk feels his breath freeze in his throat like someone’s wrapped an icy hand around it when the light pushes back the darkness from her half-covered face like a veil being thrown back. It isn’t until seconds later that he sees that she’s not a dancer, she’s actually tending the flames and there _is_ a veil pinned in her hair, which tumbles loose down her bare back. Vestal virgins are an outdated, romantic idea that no one has use for, but there must still be someone to carry the flame and tend it through the celebration, even in a place like the Academy. They’re not untouchable and Kirk has never heard of an actual virgin serving, but they’re chosen at random from the female cadets and sent out to be cold and silent as they move through the crowds, unmasked but half-veiled for tradition’s sake.

Tradition also dictates that they choose one to be sacrificed to the bonfires, but Kirk is only mostly sure that they wouldn’t do that here. Though, the way rumors fly, it’s not a wonder the girls they’ve chosen this year are a little more on edge than usual, stiffening away from lusty, lingering glances and hurrying back into the cover of shadow and moonlight.

It’s a challenge Kirk is willing to take on, just to shake this one out of that rigidity. Something nags in the back of his brain, like he should know who the woman is, but though her robe slides away from her breast as she steps back toward the shadows and he has a clear view of the crisscrossed scars on her chest and the birthmark on her stomach, Kirk doesn’t recognize her immediately, which bothers him more than it ought to.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around here,” he rumbles into her ear as she steps into earshot, but when her gaze rips up from the darkness behind him it hits him like a physical blow. He’s been half-hard since he stepped onto the cool grass to hear the whimpering moans and drawn shouts echoing from both far off and very near, but the oil glistening on her skin smells precisely like the Orion girl from those years before and mingles with the sharp scent of the ash and fire that stains neither her robe nor her unblemished skin.

“A lady knows who to watch herself around, Cadet Kirk,” she says and her voice curls around him, something sweet he wants to lose himself in, distracting enough that it doesn’t occur to him that she shouldn’t know who he is so immediately. His eyes flash in the light, but she only stares back at him with a tightness in her plush lips that says that how little he knows about her is inversely equal to how much she already knows about him. “Cadet McCoy. Medical track.”

Then he does know her, at least a little from a nagging memory of the attending physician on his medical report from one of many trips to the campus infirmary, half-conscious and too weak to refuse treatment after another fight gone bad. Kirk tries to think what she looked like then, but the chemical haze she’d kept him in for three days blocks all memories of her but a cool, professional touch, a halo of light behind her head while she worked to keep his fever down, and the curve of her back under her medical uniform when she had turned away from his bed to shout for anti-venin. He can’t be sure he didn’t hallucinate all of it, except for the scar on his throat where he nearly died that night, but it feels real enough now for Kirk. At the least, she’s kept a low profile since then, like someone might if they know they’re the kind of person that makes an easy target. Kirk grins broadly at her with this epiphany.

“That’s not who you are tonight, though.” He sounds so sure, but then she shifts her weight from one bare foot to the other and he it occurs to him that he’d like to kiss every softly curved inch of her, from her delicate little toe up, spreading her wide and fucking her hard to see what kind of noises she might make; how her eyelashes would flutter darkly against her smooth cheeks. His calloused thumb brushes over her cheekbones and down to her lips, but she doesn’t yield to him.

“I’ve got better things to do,” she says with cool indifference and sidesteps him to escape the limbo of darkest shadow and disappear into the night, pulling her face away and yes, Kirk remembers that tension in her shoulders, how she stiffens her neck and pulls her eyebrows together.

Kirk turns with her, reaches out and grabs her wrist, which doesn’t feel as delicate as it looks when he spins her around by it. McCoy collides with his chest, spitting swearwords at him as he strokes the sensitive part of her wrist with his fingertips like he might tame a feral cat. He says nothing at first; searching her darkened eyes for something he doesn’t know how to identify if it appears.

The stroke of hesitancy is enough that McCoy might have been able to peel herself away if she wanted, but instead she shifts, and laughs bitterly, though the sound is lost in the crackle of flames and a long, animal cry from a dancer drawn to the fire like a moth, and then it flashes out like a falling star.

“It’s tradition, you know,” Kirk says seriously, but if the barely perceptible tension in his hand on her wrist is meant to be a threat, McCoy disregards it. “You wouldn’t want to be around when the cadets decide which of you to throw to the fires.”

“If you think that scares me for a goddamn second, you’ve got another goddamn thing—”

“You think they wouldn’t target you?” he asks and loosens the grip on her wrist in favor of touching the curve of her back. “You don’t have anyone to champion for you like the others do. Commander Spock would kill anyone who suggested Uhura for the honor, and I can’t speak for the others, but surely someone would, right? I think I owe you for saving my life, anyway.”

McCoy looks at him for a moment, as if she’s trying to decide whether or not she believes him, though Kirk is bluffing as hard as he knows how. No one will actually die tonight, _probably_ , but McCoy sounds like she belongs in some backwater corner of the planet where they do still make virgin sacrifices and it feels good to play on that fear, even just for the moment it takes for her to remember that she thinks she’s in no danger here.

“You can keep your gratitude, then.” The bracelets around her ankles jangle softly when she turns away again, but there’s a tremble along the proud column of her spine that he steadies with another touch. Just like that, she pauses and turns back toward him and her lips twitch in a way that suggests, even for just a fleeting second in the shadows cast over her face and the glint of scar tissue and calluses on her hands, that she’s not quite as helpless as he thought before.

“Unless you want to repay me another way,” she suggests smooth as a swallow of good whiskey and it heats him from the inside out just as immediately.

“You name it,” he answers boldly because he doesn’t have to give her this, and is barely surprised when her hand closes around his and pulls him away from the heat of the bonfires.

McCoy maneuvers him through the crowd effortlessly, calculating and direct until the throng of cadets thins out to a few of their more shy classmates. There are other fires, smaller ones started by other cadets to keep away the cold when they can’t get close enough to the others. McCoy finally stops beside an abandoned, dying fire built in front of a jade monument to the conquest of Orion that shimmers oddly in the moonlight.

Kirk steps around the glowing embers, smiles, and doesn’t wait for McCoy to speak when he pushes her up against the cold stone. The shadows swallow them whole, but when he falls to his knees and lifts the hem of her robe, all he can think is that McCoy’s pale skin burns like a beacon, brighter than even her robe when he pushes it up to her waist and kisses her ankle.

“The fuck are you doing, kid?” she spits, but the vitriol in her words is sapped away when his lips trace an unseen line up her calf and rest warm and open on the back of her knee. Kirk swipes his tongue over the soft skin covering the tendon and she looses a breathy _Fuck_ into the cool night air.

The sound sends a triumphant smile across his face that doesn’t tarnish until he teases her labia between his teeth, just short of a bite; enough to make her squirm. She smells stronger of the oil here, as if someone thought to bless her All Hallows by anointing her here with the same oil on the rest of her skin. Kirk can’t decide if it’s hotter to imagine McCoy doing it herself, or to imagine Pike’s old XO, the woman in charge of collecting the Academy’s “virgins”, slipping a hand down McCoy’s belly and leaving a blessing on her chosen cadets. McCoy’s toes curl into the grass, her whole body tense and arched off the stone when he spears her with his tongue; one hand resting on her hip, circling his thumb over her jutting hip bone. When she comes, he can feel it like the hiss of electricity in the air, a live wire pressed against his and her skin. Kirk stays still for her when she digs her fingernails into his scalp, pulling his hair so hard that a few strands spring free with a faint twinge of pain, relentlessly pursuing her climax as it rips through her. McCoy’s shout trembles when it rises out of her, cutting into the night, but when Kirk finally looks up at her face, all he can see is her eyelashes fluttering against her skin the way he’d imagined and her veil sliding down the wall of jade behind her.

“Not bad,” she says and cracks an eye at him; still maddeningly cool, though Kirk doesn’t let it show how much it gets under his skin. He would rather shake that out of her, to see the expression on her face morph into something less indifferent.

“I’m not done,” he breathes and relishes the flash of surprise across her face when he stands and crushes his lips against hers. She tastes sweet and a little like the smoke in the air, like she’s swallowed the fire whole. His hands fumble for her hips, lifting her and pushing in with quick, synchronized grace that knocks her off-kilter. Her hands flail for something to grasp and his mask falls to the ground next to her abandoned veil without a hand to grab it back.

Kirk watches McCoy’s eyes slam shut and grins, her back sliding up the wall when he takes the next thrust slow. “How did you know it was me by the fires?” he asks, though it might break the spell: a chance encounter, anonymous fucking between two people who know each other, a way out in the morning when neither of them will want to face the other.

“I’m sure you’d like to know,” McCoy answers with feather-soft innocence, her lips tracing across the scar on his neck, the one from the knife-wound she treated him for. “You don’t think I didn’t learn every secret I could from you while I had you drugged in my infirmary?”

He laughs lowly and rolls his hips into hers, closing his hand around her soft hair, wondering what it would be like to fuck her on duty, without the frills and laziness they can afford on All Hallows. “It would be a goddamn shame if you didn’t have me to protect you,” he says, meaning to be exactly as condescending as he sounds. His breath comes short and his words high when she scrapes her nails down his back, leaving bloody streaks to stain his robes.

“Fuck you,” she hisses into his ear, but she throbs with something more than the aftershocks of her first orgasm, and Kirk is really all too glad to oblige that wish, holding her in place by the tangle of hair in his fist though each pounding thrust lifts her higher.

His climax takes him by surprise, surging out of him. Kirk muffles the weak, unwilling whimper that accompanies it by sinking his teeth into her throat and sucking a black mark into her smooth skin, fingering a thick scar on her abdomen that hearkens confirmation that McCoy hasn’t been a virgin in a long time. Her legs slip out of his grasp and her toes scrabble for purchase by an arm flailing to brace her tumbling weight against the monument. He pulls her into another sharp kiss; perfectly aware that the rising roar of noise behind them is likely something to do with the sacrificial portion of the festival he didn’t think would come. Maybe the rumors were true after all. Kirk can see it in McCoy’s face when she steadies herself and pales at the blood-curdling shriek that pierces through the collective hum.

“Now we’re square,” he says against her jaw and can nearly feel the ripple of his words down her limbs as she understands as the screams slowly dissipate into the sound of the crowd. For an electric moment, his eyes lock onto hers, a full circle of the last _half an hour_ , but Kirk breaks it with a cocky half-grin. Her body is pulled taut like a notched arrow about to fly, as if she’s waiting for his word to break free.

“You going to go help her, Doctor?” he taunts, as if his hands aren’t still pinning her in place.

“You goddamn sadist,” she hisses through clenched teeth, and that’s all he catches before her hands claw his yielding body out of the way, sprinting through the gathering mist on the quad with her robes a streaming banner behind her.

Kirk is left to stay only a moment longer in the fast-fading cloud of her warm scent—sex and smoke and oil—before he picks her veil from the grass and follows after her, abandoning his mask beside the dying ashes.


End file.
